What Is a City? Characteristics of a City While the size and look of cities varies around the world, there are a few things cities typically have in common. They are more urban. There is more nonagricultural activity than agricultural activity. Elected officials often make policy decisions on behalf of their electors. Examples of Cities The first cities in the world are believed to have evolved out of rural villages around B.
What Is a Town? Characteristics of a Town Towns are not as easy to spot as cities because they are often intertwined with villages. They are more rural. Town meetings, or meetings of the taxpayers, make policy decisions.
The Town, as the team is known, had been an issue during the previous city status bids. It sounds like a DIY store. He says he wouldn't want city status, even if it meant catching up with their biggest rivals Norwich City.
We are only bothered about the Premier League and we are confident that won't last for long. While some people really don't care if they wake up each morning in a town or city, others feel there is a principle at stake and are bitterly aggrieved if their city is downgraded in a newspaper or television report. Like many of the contenders, Perth believes it is already a city. The town has an ancient history and was the capital of Scotland up until Perth and Kinross Provost Dr John Hulbert, who led the bid, says Perth has always been a city to its people and "they guard it jealously".
He says aside from civic pride, it was important for the local authority to have city status because the Scottish government is developing a range of new initiatives around the country's cities. Dr Hulbert hopes the Queen's love of Scotland may work in Perth's favour.
But Prof Beckett, author of City Status in the British Isles , says the Queen's role is to rubber-stamp a ministerial decision. He says British cities have always need some kind of Royal approval and, from before the time of the Norman Invasion, a place had to have a cathedral.
The "logic was starting to look a bit fragile" when Truro and St Albans were cities but big industrial places like Belfast and Birmingham were not. Population was a big factor in the decision to award city status from the s and the unofficial figure was ,, he says, but the rule would be broken if a place had a link with the Royal family, a major event or a political ambition.
Rural flight is exacerbated when the population decline leads to the loss of rural services such as business enterprises and schools , which leads to greater loss of population as people leave to seek those features. As more and more people leave villages and farms to live in cities, urban growth results. The rapid growth of cities like Chicago in the late nineteenth century and Mumbai a century later can be attributed largely to rural-urban migration.
This kind of growth is especially commonplace in developing countries. Urbanization occurs naturally from individual and corporate efforts to reduce time and expense in commuting, while improving opportunities for jobs, education, housing, entertainment, and transportation. Living in cities permits individuals and families to take advantage of the opportunities of proximity, diversity, and marketplace competition.
Due to their high populations, urban areas can also have more diverse social communities than rural areas, allowing others to find people like them. Megacities Reflect Growing Urbanization Trend — YouTube : In the developing world, huge cities with sprawling slums have developed as agriculture and rural occupations have been supplanted by mechanized industries. Urbanization has significant economic and environmental effects on cities and surrounding areas.
As city populations grow, they increase the demand for goods and services of all kinds, pushing up prices of these goods and services, as well as the price of land. As land prices rise, the local working class may be priced out of the real estate market and pushed into less desirable neighborhoods — a process known as gentrification.
Growing cities also alter the environment. In rural areas, the ground helps regulate temperatures by using a large part of the incoming solar energy to evaporate water in vegetation and soil. This evaporation, in turn, has a cooling effect. During the day, cities experience higher surface temperatures because urban surfaces produce less evaporative cooling.
Additional city heat is given off by vehicles and factories, as well as industrial and domestic heating and cooling units. Together, these effects can raise city temperatures by 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit or 1 to 6 degrees Celsius. Recently in developed countries, sociologists have observed suburbanization and counterurbanization, or movement away from cities. These patterns may be driven by transportation infrastructure, or social factors like racism.
In developed countries, people are able to move out of cities while still maintaining many of the advantages of city life for instance, improved communications and means of transportation. In fact, counterurbanization appears most common among the middle and upper classes who can afford to buy their own homes. Race also plays a role in American suburbanization. During World War I, the massive migration of African Americans from the South resulted in an even greater residential shift toward suburban areas.
In the United States, suburbanization began in earnest after World War II, when soldiers returned from war and received generous government support to finance new homes. Suburbs, which are residential areas on the outskirts of a city, were less crowded and had a lower cost of living than cities. Suburbs grew dramatically in the s when the U. The wealthiest individuals began living in nice housing far in rural areas as opposed to forms. Suburbanization may be a new urban form.
Rather than densely populated centers, cities may become more spread out, composed of many interconnected smaller towns. Interestingly, the modern U.
For example, city governments often use political boundaries to delineate what counts as a city. Other definitions may consider total population size or population density. Different definitions may also set various thresholds, so that in some cases, a town of just 2, may count as an urban city, whereas in other contexts, a city may be defined as having at least 50, people.
Using this sort of definition, in , the U. Census Bureau. Urban areas are delineated without regard to political boundaries. Because this definition does not consider political boundaries, it is often used as a more accurate gauge of the size of a city than the number of people who live within the city limits. Often, these two numbers are not the same. For example, the city of Greenville, South Carolina has a city population under 60, and an urbanized area population of over ,, while Greensboro, North Carolina has a city population over , and an urbanized area population of around , In the United States, the largest urban area is New York City, with over 8 million people within the city limits and over 19 million in the urban area.
American urban areas by size : This map shows major urban areas in America. During the s and again in the s, the rural population rebounded in what appeared to be a reversal of urbanization. The rural rebound refers to the movement away from cities to rural and suburban areas. Urbanization tends to occur along with modernization, yet in the most developed countries many cities are now beginning to lose population.
But again in the s, rural populations appeared to be gaining at the expense of cities. Rather than moving to rural areas, most participants in the so-called the rural rebound migrated into new, rapidly growing suburbs. The rural rebound, then, may be more evidence of the importance of suburbanization as a new urban form in the most developed countries. Suburbanization is a general term that refers to the movement of people from cities to surrounding areas. However, the suburbanization that took place after was different from the suburbanization that had occurred earlier, after World War II.
In this more recent wave of suburbanization, people moved beyond the nearby suburbs to farther-away towns. Sociologists have invented several new categories to describe these new types of suburban towns; two of the most notable are ex-urbs and edge cities. Often, these communities are commuter towns or bedroom communities. Commuter towns are primarily residential; most of the residents commute to jobs in the city.
They are sometimes called bedroom communities because residents spend their days away in the cities and only come home to sleep. In general, commuter towns have little commercial or industrial activity of their own, though they may contain some retail centers to serve the daily needs of residents. Although most exurbs are commuter towns, most commuter towns are not exurban. Exurbs vary in wealth and education level.
In the United States, exurban areas typically have much higher college education levels than closer-in suburbs, though this is not necessarily the case in other countries. They typically have average incomes much higher than nearby rural counties, reflecting the urban wages of their residents. Although some exurbs are quite wealthy even compared to nearer suburbs or the city itself, others have higher poverty levels than suburbs nearer the city.
This may happen especially where commuter towns form because workers in a region cannot afford to live where they work and must seek residency in another town with a lower cost of living. Sociologists have posited many explanations for counterurbanization, but one of the most debated is whether suburbanization is driven by white flight. The term white flight was coined in the mid-twentieth century to describe suburbanization and the large-scale migration of whites of various European ancestries, from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban regions.
During the first half of the twentieth century, discriminatory housing policies often prevented blacks from moving to suburbs; banks and federal policy made it difficult for blacks to get the mortgages they needed to buy houses, and communities used restrictive housing covenants to exclude minorities. White flight during this period contributed to urban decay, a process whereby a city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. Symptoms of urban decay include depopulation, abandoned buildings, high unemployment, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable landscape.
No city, to my knowledge, has ever turned it down. What's next for the Midlands' economy after Covid and Brexit? Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth.
Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. A golden sun sets on a decades-long campaign to make Southend a city. Leon Wallis from Pixabay. John Beckett , University of Nottingham. Royal Charter David Amess.
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